The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Audio communication sessions, such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) sessions, can involve two or more users providing audio inputs to their computing devices and the devices exchanging encoded audio packets indicative of the audio inputs via a network. Upon receipt, the audio packets are decoded to obtain an audio signal, which can be output by the receiving computing device via a speaker. Some networks, such as cellular networks, can suffer from network outages. During these network outages, communication via the network is temporarily unavailable.
During these temporary network outages, a large number of audio packets may accumulate, either at an audio communication session buffer of the transmitting computing device as part of the communication session or at a component inside the network (a router, a buffer, a server, etc.). These accumulated audio packets may all then be transmitted together upon reestablishment of communication via the network. This can cause an audio communication session buffer at the receiving computing device to exceed its capacity, which could result in discarding of received audio packets. Missing audio packets will in turn result in gaps in an audio playback, which is undesirable for the listening user.